Microsoft Entra is the University’s primary SSO platform. Entra delivers secure authentication, conditional access, and basic identity governance for both cloud and on-premises applications. As a highly scalable service built on Microsoft’s global infrastructure, Entra ensures high availability by distributing authentication workloads across multiple geographically separated data centers. This design offers resilience and continuity beyond what traditional on-premises systems can provide.
Entra extends far beyond basic web authentication and single sign-on. In addition to supporting modern, standards-based protocols such as SAML, OAuth2, and OpenID Connect, it provides features not available in CAS, including adaptive multi-factor authentication, granular Conditional Access policies, privileged identity management, and advanced security insights powered by Microsoft’s threat intelligence network. These tools allow departments and application owners to enforce context-aware access controls, improve compliance, and reduce risk without managing on-premises infrastructure.
Applications integrate with Entra through standard libraries, plugins, or direct protocol support. Most modern cloud services include native Entra integrations, and developers can use Microsoft’s extensive SDKs and documentation to onboard custom applications.